Ariba Improves Performance with Move to SAP HANA

Ariba, an SAP company, is moving to SAP HANA. According to the company, the initial step, involving the transition of Ariba Spend Visibility, was completed with no downtime, and Ariba is now shifting the Ariba Network to the platform, to help companies in the business-to-business trading community to gain new insight into their operations and act on them more quickly.

SAP AG announced that its subsidiary SAP America had entered into an agreement in May 2012 to acquire Ariba, a cloud-based business commerce network, and the purchase was completed in October of that year.

“We have been running cloud operations here for 15 years at Ariba, and we have a mature cloud platform. Yet, there is the ability for us to really dramatically improve the business results for our customers by moving on to HANA,” said SAP Ariba engineering vice president Mark Dao. According to Dao, Ariba Spend Visibility was moved to SAP HANA without any disruption to service.

“With the move to HANA, we saw a dramatic improvement in data load times,” said Dao. The ability to get data loaded without having to create materialized views and other aggregates, enables data loads to be improved by 20 times and enables data information to be immediately accessible and reportable. “And then on then in terms of operational and analytical reports, we saw an average increase 30-times performance improvement, and in some cases, up to 100-times performance improvement.” Especially in reports that are driving down into more of the larger tables that we have, things like cost centers, purchase price variances, micro regions, some of the dimensions that were a little bit larger, there is now the ability to run those analyses much faster, he added.

As the Ariba Network moves to SAP HANA, SAP says companies will be able to analyze the information they have on their businesses faster, including structured data on production, marketing, sales and pricing, HR, finance, facilities and operations, as well as transaction-level data from supplier, customer and partner relationships, and unstructured data such as blogs and Tweets.

In addition, leveraging SAP Lumira, the company’s visualization software, organizations have the ability to see and interact with their data in entirely new ways and outline more informed strategies that advance their business goals. Suppliers, for instance, will for the first time be able to access their complete transaction history with a given customer and create data visualizations that allow them to understand how their payment cycles are trending or whether their invoice rejection rates are improving.